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Happiness is Your Birthright

Happiness is your birthright! Accept it. Live it. Enjoy it. Each person, regardless of wealth, status, age, or religion has the hidden desire to be happy. The urge for happiness is behind every other desire. The problem is that each person also forms a hidden or subconscious pattern that creates unhappiness. We learn those patterns. We learn to be unhappy. Some people even identify and depend on the unhappiness. 80% of us learn to communicate and manipulate through some form of dishonesty to the self, self-pity, negative mood, or gossip. In this way we stand in our own shadow and wonder why it’s not sunny.

Actually, the sun is shining all the time. We need only clear the clouds or rise above them. We need tools to rid the subconscious of the patterns of performance and the hidden self-concepts that block us from perceiving and choosing our birthright of happiness.

Happiness is a choice. It comes from the realization that we are complete in design, structure, and potential. Happiness is never found in circumstance, possessions, or relationships. It is an attitude we bring to all those areas of life.

Even success, by itself, does not bring happiness. It must be a success that is ours, that fulfills our identity, and that we accept without fear of scarcity or loss of personal control and clarity. We have an instinct for survival—to protect ourselves by fear, selfishness, and narrowness. We succeed and gain money, resources, knowledge, skills, or relationships. Then we become afraid to share or express those things because there won’t be enough or because they will not be in our control as we want them to be.

This is a basic conflict: a fundamental birthright and nature to be happy and live as an unlimited soul, which is opposed by instincts to narrow, contract, and live as a limited mind struggling for control.

Yogi Bhajan, Master of Kundalini Yoga and teacher of the psychology of Happiness, put it this way:

Happiness is your birthright. It cannot be taken away from you. But you act as if it is not your birthright. You begin to wish for happiness rather than accept it and express it. When you wish for happiness, you also wish indirectly for unhappiness, just as night and day follow each other. When you wish, every happiness is followed by sadness and every sadness by a happiness. You are not happy because you make comparisons and compete with something over which you have no control. You have no control over infinity—the vast, creative essence of life and consciousness. If you have no control over infinity, don’t try and control it. Flow with it and you can reach anywhere! Fight with it and you’ll be unhappy. There’s nothing to it. The only problem is you have not consciously developed your mental caliber, meditative mind, and the attitude of gratitude and contentment.

The mind should dance with the body, the whole Universe is your stage, the soul your choreographer. Try to feel that whatever you are doing is the most beautiful thing, the prettiest dance, because you dance with the whole Universe. Don’t resent anything. Forgive everything. Express your essence. Let your heart guide you, free of all limitation, regimentation, and fear.